“We are adding a third layer onto your dinner experience,” said its 31-year-old founder, Philip Wolf, who started the Silverthorne, Colo., company in early 2014. Wolf has two full-time employees and, after bootstrapping for two years, recently received a verbal commitment for a $400,000 investment.
He’s one of the nation’s first accredited cannabis sommeliers, having completed two levels of schooling at the Trichome Institute in Denver. It’s one of a handful of such schools, greatly outnumbered by the many certification programs for wine sommeliers. The legal-marijuana industry is in its infancy, with recreational use permitted in Colorado, Alaska, Oregon, and Washington D.C., and it’s on the ballot in eight states this year.
Trichome calls its program Interpening, which refers to “a method used to identify and understand cannabis variety, based on interpreting the plant’s terpenes and flower structure. Scientifically speaking, terpenes are evaporating molecular hydrocarbon chains that produce scent.” Wolf “will break down the strain of cannabis and give that over to the chef,” he said. “We don’t prepare the menu until two days before the event, to utilize the freshest ingredients.”
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